Arcenel was pushed more than led into the village schoolhouse, where this improvised tribunal sat in the largest classroom: a table and three chairs, facing a stool for the accused. A creased national flag behind the chairs, a Code of Military Justice on the table next to some empty forms. These chairs were occupied by a three-man court: the regimental commander flanked by a sublieutenant and a senior warrant officer, and they watched Arcenel enter in silence. Mustache, erect posture, and cold eyes: to Arcenel these men looked just like the ones from the day before, mounted on their horses in the clearing. Since the hour was grave and the shortage of manpower serious indeed, perhaps it had proved necessary to recruit the same actors for this scene, giving them just enough time to change uniforms.
In any event, it all went very quickly. After a brief summary of the facts, a glance for form’s sake at the code, an exchange of looks among the officers, the court voted with a show of hands to condemn Arcenel to death for desertion. Sentence to be carried out within twenty-four hours, the court reserving the right to refuse any appeal for clemency, the idea of which had never even crossed Arcenel’s mind. He was returned to the pump house.
The execution took place the next day near a large farm at Suippe,[12] at the firing range, with the entire regiment present. Arcenel was made to kneel in front of six men lined up at attention, arms at the order. Among them, from four or five yards away, Arcenel recognized two men he knew, doing their best to look elsewhere, while a divisional chaplain stood in the background. Between them and himself, in profile, an adjutant in charge of the firing squad was waving his saber. The chaplain did his little job and after Arcenel had been blindfolded, he did not see the men he knew raise their rifles as they stepped forward with the left foot, did not see the adjutant raise his saber, he just heard four brief orders shouted, the fourth being Fire. After the coup de grâce, at the end of the ceremony, the men were ordered to march past his body so they would reflect upon his fate.
14
AFTER ANTHIME CAME HOME, he’d been closely watched during his convalescence: they’d nursed, bandaged, washed, and nourished him; even his sleep was monitored. “They” meaning Blanche in particular, who at first had chided him gently for having grown thinner during his five hundred days at the front, without even thinking to make any allowance for the almost eight pounds a lost arm would represent. Then once he seemed nicely recovered, enough even to hazard an occasional brief smile—although only with the left corner of his lips, as if the other one were linked to the missing limb—and when he was able to live an independent life again at home, Blanche and her parents wondered whatever they would do with him.
Of course the army would pay him a pension but they couldn’t let him lie fallow, he needed an activity. Assuming that his infirmity would prevent him from carrying out his duties as an accountant with the same dexterity, Eugène Borne had an idea. While waiting to step into Eugène’s position, Charles had been the deputy plant manager, but his sudden death had left open the question of the succession. Putting off this decision for the moment, Eugène had assembled a kind of governing body for the concern, a board of directors with himself as president, which allowed him to avoid having to take all initiatives on his own and therefore sole responsibility for everything. To these weekly collegial meetings already attended by Monteil, Blanche, and Mme. Prochasson, Eugène decided to add Anthime in homage to his heroic brother and for services rendered to the firm, sweetening the deal with some director’s fees. Giving structure to Anthime’s life without constraining it, this directorship did not entail much but it was something: he was expected to attend, give an opinion—without being any more obliged to have one than the others were to listen to it—vote, and sign papers without necessarily having read them, a task he swiftly learned to carry out with his left hand. In this regard it did seem that others worried more about his handicap than he seemed to himself, for he never mentioned his missing arm.
If he didn’t, it was mostly because he had managed almost too quickly to dismiss it from his mind, except when he awakened each morning and looked for it— but only for a second. Forced to become a lefty, he did so without any fuss: having successfully taught himself to write with his remaining hand—and while he was at it to draw, too, more and more, which he’d never done with his right one—he abandoned without regret certain now impractical habits, like peeling a banana or tying his shoelaces. As regards bananas, never having particularly cared for this fruit (a recent addition, incidentally, at the market), Anthime switched easily to fruits with edible skins. Regarding shoelaces, he did not find it difficult to design and commission from the factory a prototype for shoes intended for his exclusive use, a single pair, at first, until the return of peace brought home men interested once again in lighter footwear, and Anthime’s Pertinax moccasin became a great commercial success.
Anthime had also to renounce, whenever he wanted to reflect, wait patiently, seem relaxed, or appear preoccupied, those classic postures taken by crossing the arms or clasping the hands behind the back. At first he instinctively kept trying to adopt them, remembering only at the last moment that he could not follow through. Once he’d finally assumed the role of a one-armed man, however, Anthime did not capitulate so easily, using his empty right sleeve as an imaginary arm, wrapping it around his left one across his chest or grabbing the cuff firmly behind his back. However assumed this role was, though, when he automatically stretched out his arms upon awakening, he also mentally stretched the missing limb, with a tiny twitch in his right shoulder. Once fully alert, and once he’d decided that the day offered few things to do, it wasn’t unusual for him to return to sleep after eventually masturbating, which, with his left hand, had not really posed a problem.
So: frequent idleness, to reduce which as much as possible Anthime trained himself to read his paper with a single hand and even to shuffle a deck of cards before tackling a game of solitaire. Managing at last to hold his trump cards under his chin, it took him a little more time before he risked playing silent games of manille at the Cercle Républicain with other cripples back from the front as well, all tacitly agreeing never to mention what they’d seen. Of course Anthime played slower than the veterans who’d lost one or both legs, but also faster than the gas victims who didn’t have cards in Braille. But when players kept offering to help him and then peeked at his cards, he finally got fed up and stopped going to the Cercle.
The boredom of those weeks, the solitude, and then—Anthime had the sudden impression one day, in front of the cathedral, that things might be looking up: as his gaze drifted over the pedestrians and pavement, he distractedly ran that gaze up the length of a cane tapping along the sidewalk across the street and wound up staring at a pair of glasses. Such canes were not yet white, as they would be painted only after the war, nor were the glasses completely black, and they weren’t dark enough to prevent Anthime from recognizing behind them the face of Padioleau. Sent home from the front at almost the same time as Anthime, guided by his mother holding on to his arm, blinded by a gas that had smelled like geraniums, Padioleau immediately recognized his voice.
12
At five a.m. on March 10, 1915, the French soldiers of the 21st Company of the 336th Infantry Regiment, exhausted by fighting and losses sustained during two months of fruitless combat in their sector, were ordered to launch a fresh attack on the enemy’s position north of the village of Souain. The terrain in front of them was strewn with the corpses of their comrades, cut down by withering German machine-gun fire in several recent abortive attacks or fatally enmeshed in the barbed wire both sides deployed to protect their positions. French artillery fire, intended to soften up the enemy, was instead pounding no-man’s-land and its own trenches. A witness would later claim that General Réveillac, who ordered the attack, was trying to drive his men out into the open. The French soldiers refused to budge. (During the ensuing court-martial, one of the defendants insisted that “whoever went over the top would have been literally mowed down by either our fire or the German machine-gunners.”)
Incensed, General Réveillac ordered the company commander to submit the names of eighteen soldiers and his six youngest corporals, who were brought before a court-martial. Meeting on March 16 in a room of the city hall in Suippe, the court-martial acquitted the soldiers and two corporals and condemned to death corporals Louis Girard, a watchmaker; Lucien Lechat, a café waiter; Louis Lefoulon, a railroad worker; and Théophile Maupas, a teacher. On the following day, March 17, two hours before the camp was informed that their sentences had been commuted to hard labor, the condemned were shot at the Suippe Farm.
Upon receiving the news of her husband’s execution, Blanche Maupas began her long battle seeking justice for the corporals of Souain with great courage and perseverance. In 1934, the four men were at last rehabilitated by the Special Military Tribunal for the Review of Court-Martial Convictions, and their names were cleared.
In 1957 Stanley Kubrick made